Interesting. That’s kinda the problem with using terms for jobs from 1000years ago and applying them to modern times. From what you showed, the locksmith likely has no idea how to actually work with metal (which is what “smith” means.). Seems like what a locksmith did in 1200, is now 4 different guys: the security expert, who is a very skilled individual with a medium education. The mechanical engineer who actually designs it, which is skilled, but general purpose and probably has a masters degree. The actual smith, whose responsible for the machine who maybe has a 2 year degree and can work any laser cutter with very little required skill. And a guy who physically installs it, which takes no skill other than following directions. So “locksmith” has an extremely wide range of skill and education. Which was kinda the point of my original post that the US is so huge and complex that asking about general things like that isn’t going to get very much info because the answer is always: depends on what you mean. Like the “construction worker.” There are Ph.Ds working in construction, and there are guys who ate glue in school.
I'm going to disagree about the guys hammering walls together being the equivalent of assembly line workers. They aren't endlessly repeating the same action ten thousand times a day. Framers are skilled labor. Dry wallers are skilled labor. Finish carpenters are skilled labor. They are the ones who construct the house, discover the miscalculations the designer made on paper, and make things work anyway. They are no more open to bribes for off the record changes than anyone else. For the record, my son was a framer. My husband was a locksmith for a local medical center in addition to being the carpenter who built furniture for the place. He took special courses offered by the company that built the locks used in the hospital and learned to key, repair, and install lock systems throughout the building. He had the responsibility for keeping track of who had what key (the number of keys numbered in the thousands) and was the person called when someone lost their key. That was in the days of metal keys and old fashioned locks. Everything is chips and scanners now.
Ok, another school-related question - do American schools still use chalkboards? There is a myth going around that more advanced countries have all started using whiteboards instead, but I read that it's not 100% true. Sorry for using an outdated term, but that's how we call them in Poland. Maybe we're using outdated doors, but I've never seen a door with a mechanical lock. Locksmith here makes, dismantles, and fixes metal locks. Poland is, by European standards, a pretty outdated country when it comes to technology.
While it may take some skill, it’s not really required. Actually, construction is something you can easily pull the two groups apart because there is a group in the USA who did it. It’s called “Habitat for Humanity.” They build houses for the poor, I’ve been involved in more than a dozen of them. Pipes, electrical, design… these they have professionals for. Framing, drywall, plywood, trim, paint is stuff they will literally throw children at. Volunteers are supervised and inspections are done, but they’re still just random people and I was not exaggerating when I said children. I was framing walls with my grandfather when I was 8 years old. Also, about bribery: not in this country. In the USA, plans for structures that house people or past a certain size, must be approved by a government inspector. If you want a secret gun storage in your house, you can’t ask the designer to do it. They can’t put it in the plans because if they do, it’s not secret and if it’s not in the plans, how would the personal actually building it know to do that?” And hiding guns inside walls, is not uncommon in the US.
generally you'll see whiteboards but some poorer schools probably still use chalkboards. Edit: and that goes for most institutions; the general move in churches, offices, etc. seems to have been toward white boards.
Probably only the poorest, most remote parts of the country. I have friends who now teach at where I went to HS. It’s a dinky town in the middle of nowhere and all the chalkboards have been replaced. My neices and nephews schools were also whiteboards only and are not in wealthy areas. In fact, some of their classes have smart boards instead of whiteboards.
This. Yeah, every state is different and have different prices and material. Also, some states have more school shootings than others. For some reason? I suppose it might have to do with gun laws? But I haven't studied them much, but they are a thing that happens, sadly.
I’m not sure what you mean here. Do doors just not lock there? You can’t have a non-mechanical lock. Locksmiths here probably outsource actual smithing. Machines to work with metal aren’t cheap or small so they tend to be owned in bulk by a general purpose machinist. I order small, custom metal pieces all the time and it’s cheaper than owning or operating these machines. I can take a broken pin from a machine, send it to someone. They scan it into a 3D file, fix whatever’s broken, and send the new file to a cutter/printer. It’s completely trivial.
In Krakow they have quantum locks. Elsewhere in Poland, they prop a 2 x 4 under the knob. (Sorry @Cress Albane —I couldn't help myself! I take it back!)
Most people believe this has way more to do with lack of mental health care than the guns themselves. Large magazines and access to automatic weapons might increase the body count, but not the shooter count. Guns are just the politics football to rile both sides up because health care overhauling is hard. Don’t forget that in this country, if you want health care, it’s gonna cost you. Even with very good employer provided health care, the deductible tends to still in several thousand dollars and working class people just can’t afford it.
Yeah. I'm familiar with Habitat. Good intentions, warm and fuzzy feelings, but some questionable results, perhaps because they think the basic framework that supports everything from roof to walls is a job for random people and children. My husband spent several days fixing mistakes made by volunteers on a on a house built for a woman here in town. She ended up with a substantial mortgage on a poorly built house constructed by volunteers with few if any skills, but they felt real good about themselves afterwards. Well, if you're happy thinking skill isn't required to erect or finish a house, I won't try and talk you out of it. May your house never fall on your head.
That reminds me of those TV shows where they come out and do a Dream Remodel on somebody's house in like a day or 2, then show how excited and happy the person is. What they don't show is how everything falls apart in the next few months because they did it so fast. Made it look real good for TV Though. Also reminds me of the brief time I spent working at an underhanded used car dealership. He would use aluminum tape to cover big rust holes and have the bodyship paint over it. He also had me use a can of spraypaint to 'fix' a badly stained carpet. It just needs to look good enough until the car is off the lot.
Yeah, I no longer support this organization either, but for different reasons. Every single house I built for a poor family, is now owned by a venture capitalist or a rich person who is now charging rent to the people it was meant for. When the time comes, we’ll eat the landlords first.
That's the problem with giving houses to the poor. It seems like such a good idea, but often they can't afford the property taxes.
Sorry, I got confused. Since you listed so many specialists, I thought you were talking about something more complex than a simple metal lock with a metal key. Here, it's usually all molded into one profession that would translate to "locksmith". You need a three-year vocational education to become one. Other than that, I guess there are, like corporate designers who decide how a lock in a certain set of doors would be designed? But everything else, as far as I know, is done by a locksmith. Again, sorry for the confusion. I can be really stupid sometimes. Kraków has anything besides one of the highest pollution rates in Europe?
That’s a myth, habitat doesn’t give houses to people, they build low income houses and the recipients buy them. They’re just quickly offered more than what it’s worth at the time because everyone knows the value of realty only really goes up and ten years down the line they’re raking it in. Yeah, locks aren’t made like this here, everything except for the high end custom stuff that Frederick mentioned is mass produced. It’s cheaper and easier to simply replace a lock than to repair it, and they usually install with just a screwdriver. You can walk into any hardware store in the country and have a selection of a dozen easy to install locks. Actually, locksmiths are called fairly commonly to get into cars if the key is lost or doesn’t work. They’ll pick the lock, but they aren’t fixing it for you, a general mechanic will do that on a car.
Probably the biggest thing to understand about the US from the outside is how big we really are. I could probably drive the circumstance of Poland is less than a day, you can’t even get down the east coast of the us in a day. The US could fit two entire EUs inside of it. The EU is something like 4m square miles, we’re 9m. Your entire country fits very comfortably inside our largest state, so the diversity that you may think of between your own Poland and the furthest other European country is still less distance than far points within in the US, and while we do standardize a lot, there are huge differences between the various regions of the US, so maybe find a part of the US you want to put your story first. This is why Hitler never really considered war with the US, why the USSR never considered invading Europe, and why Hiro Hito knew the US had to be knocked out fast. No matter how much territory they conquered, there is no competing with the industrial power of a country as big as us.
Ohhh, ok, that makes sense, thanks for your patience in explaining this. Out of curiosity, I checked whether locks could be bought in hardware stores in Poland. I got bombarded with locksmithing offers instead. But I found one hardware shop that sells locks, two cities away from where I was looking I think I mentioned it somewhere in this thread, but the story was to be set in Virginia. I always thought of US as 50 smaller countries that all happen to speak the same language. And yeah, it takes about 10 hours to get from the baltic sea to the southern end of Poland by car.
I think you have it backward. Locksmiths don't make locks. Factories make locks, and the factories are manned by semi-skilled, assembly line workers. On a construction site, doors are hung and locks installed by carpenters. Yes, carpenters -- and if it's a union job, woe be unto anyone else who picks up a lock. Locksmiths sell locks, they repair locks, they pick locks, they cut new keys for existing locks, and they re-key existing locks either to fit the same key as another lock, or to change a lock so that the old keys won't open it any more.
Barbers have to be licensed in my state. But, as I mentioned in a previous post, we have 50 states, and they all have their own laws. It's never safe to generalize. And it appears that all 50 now require that barbers be licensed: https://www.barber-license.com/barber-license-requirements/
Technically, that's more correct than not. The United States is a constitutional republic --basically an association of sovereign states that have agreed to allow the federal government to regulate certain things in the interest of enhanced trade and travel. There was considerable debate at the time the U.S. constitution was drafted as to how strong the federal government should be. Each side published a number of "broadsides" advancing their respective arguments. In the end, the federalists (those who favored a stronger central government) won. Current events suggest that this might not have been a good result. The constitution is supposed to limit the powers of the federal (national) government, but the Congress tends to overlook that dusty od document and do as they please. But that's a discussion for another day, and a different forum. The point is that the U.S. has 50 states and 50 sets of state laws, all overlain by an umbrella of federal laws.
Yeah, coming from a European, I could see why you might think of us that way. We do have a much more shared culture than you Europeans though, probably specifically because of our common language. yeah, but this is another one of those things like mechanics. You meet one through a licensed business, but then you cut the middle man out and work with them directly for a way better price. Wife goes to salons only to find a new stylist, then every time after just go to their house. Same reason as mechanics, when working for a salon, the stylist might make $50 for the hour plus tip while the salon owner does nothing and pockets $100. If you pay the stylist directly, they get twice as much, wife pays half as much, and useless owner gets what they deserve: $0. Stylists without license that already have a large client base don’t need a license and spread through word of mouth.
I have a friend who used to be an automotive technician. (That's the current buzzword for "mechanic.") He earned a bunch of money taking side gigs, as you describe. The thing is, it's legal for him to do that. It's NOT legal for a barber or cosmetologist to work without a license. It's not just the business that needs a license -- each barber or hairdresser has to be licensed. Your wife may find a new stylist by going to the salon, but if the stylist has a day job at a salon, he or she has a license. If he or she doesn't have a license, he or she is breaking the law and is likely to pay some steep fines when caught.
The schools where I sub can have either, in addition to a large central screen that can have images projected on it from the teacher's computer. In 2012 this probably wouldn't have been the fancy big-screen-TV affair the best-equipped classrooms have now. Here's a picture from a social studies class I substituted for in a middle school in 2015. This was typical for the entire district: You can see the projectable thing in the middle [EDIT-- "Smart Board"] and the chalkboard to the left. Here's a full whiteboard, from a German class in a different district, also in 2015: Sorry it's blurry. Me, I prefer the chalkboard. 85% of the time, the stupid Dri-Erase markers for the whiteboard are dried up and useless. If you need any other views of a typical American high school classroom, let me know and I can shoot a few pictures for you next time I go in. Without students present, of course. As for vocational training, my county is located just outside a traditionally-industrialized area. High school students are encouraged to enter the skilled trades, while they're in high school or after they graduate, because there are jobs that need filled that pay a darn sight more than you'll earn coming out of a four-year college with a bachelor's in, for instance, Sociology. No stigma whatsoever. But that's western Pennsylvania. Virginia in 2012? No idea. EDIT-- And are you talking eastern Virginia, around Washington, D.C., or western Virginia, up in the highlands? The former will be more prosperous. The latter, not so much so, unless the school is in or near an urban center like Richmond. Nice place, I've heard.
